You Don't Have To Say You Love Me
by Laura Schiller
Summary: One song resonates across three generations of the Williams family.


You Don't Have To Say You Love Me

By Laura Schiller

Based on: Doctor Who

Copyright: BBC

(Author's Note: This was inspired by a line from episode 6x05, "The Rebel Flesh", in which they hear this song playing and Rory mentions his mother being a "massive fan" of Dusty Springfield. Then when I looked up the lyrics, they turned out to be so strikingly appropriate for both Amy/Rory and Doctor/River that a story like this just begged to be written. Please enjoy.)

"_You don't have to say you love me, just be close at hand.  
You don't have to stay forever,I will understand.  
Believe me – believe me – I can't help but love you,  
but believe me, I'll never tie you down."_

- Dusty Springfield, "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me"

1.

Brian Williams looks, as she expected, unutterably dashing in his Royal Navy uniform, his gray eyes brighter than ever beneath the white hat with the blue brim. As she expected, Emily Wright cannot bring herself to admire it. He looks like someone about to step into a submarine and get himself killed.

Patriotic duty or no, seeing him like this makes her wish heartily that their iron lady of a PM would hand over the Falklands to Argentina and be done with them. A few islands are not worth the risk of Brian's life.

Whatever he can see behind her eyes makes his smile fade, and he draws her close to him, her head tucked beneath his chin. "Emily," he murmurs, his voice resonating against her, "I … "

"You don't have to say it." She puts her finger to his lips.

"How did you know … ?"

He sounds amazed, and it's her turn to smile.

"Because I love you too."

Even though they've been together a year, this is the first time either of them has said it.

"I can't promise you anything," he says, his face flushed like a schoolboy's even as his eyes look suddenly so much older. "What if I don't come back? It wouldn't be … it wouldn't be right."

She grabs the lapels of his jacket, clinging to them as if she'll never let go.

"Promise me you'll try your damnedest to keep safe," she says.

He nods, with all the solemnity of a wedding vow. "I can do that."

"And I will wait for you," she says, "No matter how long it takes."

She stands up on tiptoe, takes his face between her hands and kisses him, letting him taste the salt of her tears, letting him touch her with all the fierce, desperate love he cannot put into words.

Her Brian has always been a man of action, and she wouldn't have him any other way. Still, the next time she hears that song on the radio, it makes her lean her head against the steering wheel of her car and cry. She has always liked Dusty Springfield's voice, with its unique blend of innocence and passion, but today the golden-haired American seems to be singing from the depths of Emily's own heart.

2.

"_Left alone with just a memory, life seems sad and so unreal … all that's left is loneliness, there's nothing left to feel … "_

Singing, Rory Williams has found, is one of the few ways to pass the time while guarding the Pandorica. Sometimes, as his voice bounces off the rough stone walls and the smooth contours of the Pandorica, his tone-deafness balanced by the echoes, it almost feels like he has company. Other times, the sound of his own voice only depresses him, especially when this song reminds him so much of his mother. Emily Williams, that is, not Livia, the eagle-eyed Roman matron who was part of the false memories implanted by the Autons.

Closing his eyes, he can see the white soap suds in the sink, his mother's slender hands wiping a glass until it sparkled while she sang along. _There's no shame in waiting, Rory, _he hears her say. _Amy thinks the world of you, I know … she's just scared to admit it. She'll come around._

"Is this what you had in mind, Mum?" he asks dryly, tugging his crimson cloak, looking down at the gleam of his Centurion's armor in the torchlight.

Amy, he remembers, once scoffed at that particular song. _It's cheesy, it's old-fashioned and it's stupid, _she used to say, tossing her fiery hair, precocious at nine years old. _The woman's a doormat. If he won't commit to her, she should kick him to the curb. _This in spite of – or, knowing Amy, because of – the unmistakable resonance between the woman in the song and Amy's own feelings for the Doctor.

_It's about loving selflessly, _Emily replied. _Loving someone enough to wait for him. That's got nothing to do with being a doormat. _

Looking at Rory in his father's borrowed shirt and bow tie – his Doctor costume – Amy's hazel eyes softened and she nodded silently. She never said a word against Dusty Springfield after that.

"Oh God, Mum," he murmurs, blinking dry plastic eyes, staring down at the cannon in his plastic hand. "I never thought I'd envy you so much. At least Dad came back to you alive and sane … at least you didn't bloody _kill_ him."

He remembers Amy's deep bond with the Doctor; her blank indifference the last time they met in his Auton form; her eyes flying open as his bullet pierced her, her body falling back until her scarf brushed the ground. He does not guard her body for her own sake; it is, after all, the safest prison in the universe. He guards her, purely and simply, because he cannot leave her. He wonders if, in his parents' eyes, that would still count as loving selflessly.

Dusty got one thing right, though. Waiting definitely hurts.

"Sorry, Amy," he says, with one hand on the Pandorica. "I know you think it's cheesy, but I kind of need it right now."

And so he sings to her, a walking anachronism, defying time and space and even death itself. Somewhere, somewhen, he imagines Amy pretending to roll her eyes as she grins

3.

Not once in their centuries together has the Doctor ever told River Song that he loves her.

As a new bride after Area 51, she was desperate for him to say it. _If it's real, it doesn't need saying, _Rory used to tell her, his gray Williams eyes turned on her in gentle reassurance. _But if he doesn't say it, _she retorted, _how do I know it's real?_

She knows now, though. She knows it by the way the Doctor has never failed to catch her when she launched herself off towers, into space or towards trouble; the way he whispered to her in Gallifreyan when they are alone at night; the way he gave his own life energy to heal her; the way he showed her his darkest, most dangerous sides even as she showed him hers and still kept coming back. Most of all, she knows it by the way he says goodbye.

"If you ever loved me," she tells him, "Say it like you're coming back."

In a soft voice, with a smile of infinite sorrow lighting the wreck of the TARDIS like a star, he replies: "See you around, River Song."

_If it's real, it doesn't need saying. _Finally, she understands what her father meant.

Still, as she cuts the projection and returns to CAL, she knows in her soul that the Doctor will not be seeing her around; that this goodbye is a final one, and that it is right.

Charlotte and the ghosts of her archaeology team plead with her, but she will not be moved. The Library computer is the most beautiful, elaborate prison ever constructed, but at the end of the day, it is still a prison, and she is, after all, the greatest escape artist in history.

"Besides," she tells Charlotte, "I miss my family."

Where everything else failed to convince, this does. Her sad brown eyes fill with understanding, and the space around them swirls and flickers as the computer-child accesses River's memory.

She finds herself in the Williams family kitchen, with the sunlight gilding the cream-colored walls and apple pie baking in the oven. Rory is there, still in his green scrubs, sleepily nursing a mug of coffee; Amy, arranging a vase of sunflowers, talking a mile a minute in her lilting Scotch alto; Brian, quiet and sturdy in his plaid shirt, listening to them all with a wry smile on his face; Emily, her hands dusted with flour and her sandy hair falling out of its bun, singing gently along to the Dusty Springfield song on the radio; even Augustus and Tabetha Pond, who coldly disapproved of Mels in her lifetime, looking warm and relaxed at the kitchen table which should really not have held so many.

And the Doctor, always the Doctor, playing with River's fingers under the table, smiling like a thousand-year-old schoolboy, making them all laugh with his wild, impossible stories and – for once – wearing peace and contentment in his ancient eyes. And it doesn't matter what face he happens to be wearing, or that her parents and grandparents look no older or younger than she is. All that matters is that they are together.

Soon, she believes, they might be.

The young Doctor meant to save her, but since then, surely he must have learned that there are worse things than death. Emily waited for Brian, Rory waited for Amy, but River Song has had enough of waiting.

"_Believe me, believe me, I can't help but love you," _River sings to the memory of her husband, with a change of lyrics that means everything and nothing. _"But believe me, you'll never tie me down."_

And with a click, a flicker, and a single word spoken by the ghost of a little girl, Melody Pond Williams is free at last.


End file.
